Tunnel drive
In general, I like living in Hampton Roads, I honestly do. Last night did not provide a good example…
There are three bridges in my Metro area that can take me from work to home. Assuming no heavy traffic, the Monitor-Merrimac bridge-tunnel does so in about 40-45 minutes; the James River bridge adds about 20-25 minutes to that; and the Hampton Roads bridge-tunnel adds about 20 minutes to the MMBT. (I have a bad tendency to refer to them as the Mimbit, the Jerb, and the Herbit.)
Unless it’s 1am, though, there’s probably going to be an additional 10-30 minutes of heavy traffic on the Herbit, and the Mimbit is a crapshoot: sometimes I fly straight through, and sometimes I sit waiting an extra 15-20 minutes. We have handy electronic signs alerting us to congestion on the Mimbit and Herbit, but because of geography, by the time I see one, the Jerb is already out of the question.
Yesterday, the signs warned me that the Mimbit was blocked by an accident – based on reports I’ve heard, an idiot trying to cut off a fellow driver. I had a quick decision to make – wait in blocked traffic there, and hope the accident is cleared within an hour (it usually is) or join all the additional traffic to the Herbit, probably incurring a 90-minute delay. I joined the queue of blocked traffic.
I took 2 hours to reach the tunnel entrance for the Mimbit, only to find that the tunnel remained blocked and that traffic was being forcibly rerouted back to the other two bridges. I don’t know the Jerb route well enough to ensure I wouldn’t get lost, so I joined the crowded line for the Herbit. 90 minutes later, I was finally home. 3.5 hours to make a 45-minute commute. (Turns out that the Jerb was just as bad.)
Starr, aware of the situation thanks to cell phones, had pizza and chocolate waiting. I love this woman.
Starr, aware of the situation thanks to cell phones, had pizza and chocolate waiting. I love this woman.
Win.
40-45 minutes to work one way?
I don’t mind traffic anymore, living in LA will get you used to that, but I can’t abide a long commute.
I’ve been there. A couple years ago, it took me about the same time to get from the Oceanfront to Portsmouth. By the time I got home, I ate and went to bed.
This is an interesting example of why first-gen rerouting GPS directions aren’t as helpful as one might think. If a primary route goes down, everyone gets rerouted to the same “optimal” secondary route, which very shortly becomes highly non-optimal. There’s been some work on “statistical” rerouting, where based on best available traffic info your GPS rolls the dice based on a statistical distribution of routes and puts you on one, hopefully distributing everyone based on alternate route capacity and therefore streaming everyone through in a better fashion. In this case though, given the bridge/tunnel chokepoints, your options even with the best info were probably marginal.
Kinda makes you wish for a ferry, or a personal pneumatic tube.
Precisely why I’m glad that aside from work and the odd grocery run that my happy little world can stay in a two black area for ages and still happily run without incident.
I think you mean “block”.
I really don’t think much of the commute at all, but our apartment is pretty much equidistant from my job, Starr’s job, and our social life.
It’ll get worse in a couple of weeks; we’re moving to a much bigger, much nicer, and half as expensive place which will put us closer to our social life, and farther from our jobs
The pneumatic tube would be awesome, especially if they played a Gerry Anderson title theme at the same time!
To quote Homer Simpson…..”DOH!”